Thursday, December 25, 2014

Na's Christmas card list - 1945

One of my often neglected personal projects is to transcribe more family documents. Among the most useful things I inherited, genealogically speaking, were a few address books. Sometimes I wish I'd seen Na's while she was around to answer questions, although her writing is pretty clear.

The latest one I'm doing is a little notebook from my maternal grandparents used in the 1940s mostly to list letters received and sent. How quaint these lists must seem to some! Will genealogists a hundred years forward analyze computer lists of our 'Merry Christmas' tweets and Facebook 'Happy New Year' updates, I wonder?

At this time, my grandparents, Amy (née Irwin) and Walter Scott, were living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada where grandpa was working for Dominion Glass. In 1945, my mother, their only child, then in the Canadian Army, was still in Washington, DC, USA. Her name isn't on this list, but there is another list for letters sent and received in December - they had sent her 3 letters in December and an "Xmas box".

It appears that this list is for mailed cards, so other cards were likely hand delivered.

The following names are from my Na's handwritten list of 46 names, almost all surnames, for cards and letters sent "for Xmas 1945". I'm transcribing all names from the book, cross referencing them with other lists and building a FAN list for my grandparents, but this is the only Christmas list. (A FAN list is for Friends, Associates, Neighbours - a research technique made popular by Elizabeth Shown Mills.1)

I do know who almost all these people must have been, although there are a few left to verify. Many of these cards and letters went to family and friends in Newdale, Manitoba, Canada where my grandmother was born and my grandparents had previously lived. If you are interested in Newdale, please see my Newdale Genealogy website.

The three with just their given names, Ann, Hattie and Sam, were my grandpa Scott's sisters and brother; Irwin, St. B. was F. W. Irwin in St. Boniface, Manitoba whose address is given on another page in the book. (The ones that interested me most were the Martin and Pollock names. More about those another time.)

If you think there's a connection here, please be in touch.

Lavery

L

Congdon

L

Young

C

Stewart

C

Laurence

L

Irwin

L

Carmichael

C

Rose

C

McCallum

C

Macmorine

L

Pollock

C

Pattison

C

Ann

Hattie

L

Sam

L

Jardine

Redpath

C

McNichol

C

Grayston

C

Mein

C

Adams

C

Graham

L

Hawryluk

L

Stewart

L

Duthie

L

English

L

Kingdon

C

McTavish (Grace)

C

Kaatz

C

Martin

L

Riches

L

Nixon

Sing

C

Irwin St. B

C

Carmichael M. G.

L

Drummond

L

Walkey

C

McTavish Eva

C

Dale

C

Brock

C

Hodges

C

Clarke

C

McT, Myrt

C

Wiggins

C

LeRoy

C

Laurence D.

C

Myler

C

1 See Elizabeth Shown Mills website, Historic Pathways, for more about the FAN principle.